You Can’t Just Drop Your Content Off at the Dock

You Can’t Just Drop Your Content Off at the Dock

Streamlining Workflows and Updating Content

The other day, I was on a call with one of our largest customers. They are among the very largest CPG companies in the world. (In fact, they may very well be the largest.) They’ve evaluated every product, met with every company.

We were on a call with their head of supply chain, who was describing our product to someone else. He commented that we have a lot of great capabilities.

We’d helped his company...

streamline their workflows

get their content updated on multiple retailer sites

bring their item setup times for products down from over three months to under three days.

But among everything he said, there was one thing he said that really stuck with me.

“You can’t just drop your product content off at the dock.”

He’d tried other solutions that claimed to store and syndicate content. While those solutions consolidated his content in one place, they couldn’t publish that content to retailers in real time. As importantly, if not more importantly, those solutions didn’t check to confirm that the content had gone live.

"What is the point of making all that investment in content," he asked,“if there isn't an automated system to tell you whether thecontent has gone live, and to let you know when it hasn't?"

Now, you might be wondering: why does this problem even exist at all?

It seems like it should be a simple matter to move content from A to B, from a supplier to a retailer. In an ideal world, it would be just that simple. But as the old saying goes, “you say tomato, I say tomahto.”

Put another way, in order for Company A to deliver product content to Company B, they need to be speaking the same language. Their products, and all the fields that make up those products, need to map to each other. Once that happens, once the content is delivered to Company B, the content needs to go live.

Seems simple—just push a button and content is live. But it turns out that many retailer content management systems (even Amazon’s) were built years ago.

Describing products is complicated. Take diapers for example. They come in 24 packs, 50 packs, 108 packs, 192 packs, 240 packs, and each of those packs comes in multiple sizes: size 0, 1 2, 3, etc. Put all those sizes and pack sizes together and something that seems simple, diapers, has a lot more complexity than it appears at first glance.

And that’s why you can’t just “drop your content off at the dock.”

If you do, you’ll have invested enormous amounts of time and money only to find out that you built the world’s best product content that none of your customers can see.

Easy to use content management, syndication and validation

Creating great product content is already hard enough. At Content Analytics, we're proud to deliver a solution that makes getting it live easy. If you need simple, easy to use product information management and syndication, and validation when your content goes live (and when it doesn't): get in touch.